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Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy

Molecules adsorbed on nanostructured coinage-metal surfaces show Raman signals enhanced by roughly 10^6 to 10^10, dominated by the intense localized fields of surface plasmon resonances, with a smaller chemical charge-transfer contribution. Because both incoming and scattered fields are amplified, the enhancement scales approximately as the fourth power of the local field, and hot spots between nanoparticles can reach single-molecule sensitivity.